denmancentral wrote: 450 peoples' driving needs covered per turbine
Your David MacKay link needed to be .shtml --- It is a light and fun read, and he has entered the field as an "outsider", so doesn't have any agenda.
450 cars per 3MW wind turbine sounds fine, but as Brian Cox discovered on his Horizon program, could they be built in time?
You are saying we would need 60000 3MW wind turbines to power UK cars, which means we would have to erect thirteen a day, every day, for the next thirteen years (life span of average car?), should the Government ban the sale of internal combustion powered cars today.
The planning inquiries alone would take ten years! We would really need to pull our collective finger out.
mrjemm wrote:And electric cars... Ergh. I don't consider them green as yet. Don't get me wrong, I am pro wind, and it's use/development, but have serious reservations about electric vehicles at present
They might not be green, but the David MacKay link above investigates using electric car "batteries" connected to the grid as temporary stores of power to even out the fluctuations in wind energy; it looks like they would be well matched.
Some of you might like to see one of the bits MacKay has written about bicycles